Samsung’s Gear VR is officially the first virtual reality headset on the market, but what does that mean? And should you buy it? Ben Gilbert sat down with the company’s VP/GM of immersive products and VR Nick DiCarlo to find out. That’s not all we ha…
President Barack Obama on Monday defended his response to protests against police injustice and framed the relationship between law enforcement and communities of color as an issue that’s personal for him.
Obama said stories of being unfairly stopped by police that he heard during a recent meeting with activists from Ferguson, Missouri, reminded him of his own experiences.
“My mind went back to what it was like for me when I was 17, 18, 20,” Obama said during an interview with BET that aired Monday night.
Reiterating his pledge to work to rebuild trust between law enforcement and communities of color, Obama described how he would want his children and grandchildren to be treated by police.
“I want my children to be seen as the individuals that they are, and I want them to be judged by the content of their character,” Obama said. “I want my grandsons to be treated like anybody else’s grandsons.”
It wasn’t the first time that Obama has spoken about race in personal terms as president. After Trayvon Martin, an unarmed teenager, was shot to death by neighborhood watch volunteer George Zimmerman in Florida in 2012, Obama said, “if I had a son, he’d look like Trayvon.”
Obama also pushed back on criticism that he had been too passive in his response to protests that followed grand jury decisions in Ferguson and in New York City not to indict white police officers in the killing of black men. After a Ferguson grand jury failed to indict former officer Darren Wilson in the death of Michael Brown, Obama made a late-night televised statement calling for protests to be peaceful.
“I’m being pretty explicit about my concern. I’m being pretty explicit about the fact that this is a systemic problem,” Obama said Monday. Obama added that he “institutionally” could not say whether he thinks the grand juries should have indicted the police officers, because his comments may compromise ongoing federal investigations.
“Part of the rule of law is that I’m not putting my thumb on the scale of justice,” Obama said. He added that he thought Attorney General Eric Holder was correct to begin a civil rights investigation into the death of Eric Garner, who died after a New York City police officer placed him in a chokehold this summer.
Obama also expressed support for protesters, saying that as long as the demonstrations were peaceful, they were necessary.
Delbert Rodriguez Gutierrez, a 21-year-old Miami graffiti artist known for his “DEMZ” tag, is in critical condition after City of Miami Police Detective Michael Cadavid hit him with an unmarked car in the early morning hours on December 5.
At 2am on Friday Cadavid spotted Gutierrez tagging a building near the corner of NW 5th Avenue and 24th Street in Wynwood, the Miami Herald reported. According to police the artist fled around a corner and hid between two parked cars when the officer began flashing his lights. Police say that as Cadavid came around the corner in his car, Gutierrez allegedly leaped out in front of him and was struck.
NEW YORK (AP) — Ken Weatherwax, who played the child character Pugsley on “The Addams Family” television series in the 1960s, has died. He was 59.
Weatherwax died of a heart attack at his Box Canyon, California, home over the weekend, said Joey D. Vieira, his half brother. Weatherwax’s body was found on Sunday.
Pugsley, the son of Gomez and Morticia, was a member of the family of macabre oddballs in the television series, which aired on ABC from 1964 to 1966 with its familiar, finger-snapping theme song.
He stayed in show business after he grew up, although on the other side of the camera. Weatherwax worked as a grip on the sets of several Hollywood productions, said Vieira, a former actor himself who played the character Porky in the original “Lassie” series.
Weatherwax retired a few years ago for medical reasons, Vieira said.
Copyright 2014 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
There continues to be enormous confusion on Obamacare. Contrary to claims about the American people being stupid, the confusion is starting at the top. Last week New York, Senator Charles Schumer, the third ranking Democrat in the Senate complained that the Affordable Care Act (ACA) would only help a relatively small number of people, most of whom don’t even vote. For this reason he argued that the Democrats made a mistake in pushing through the ACA and should have instead focused on the economy.
This argument is silly for two reasons. First, while the Democrats certainly should have done more on the economy, Schumer doesn’t indicate what he thinks they could have accomplished had they not pushed the ACA. Would Congress have approved a larger and longer stimulus (i.e. had much bigger budget deficits) if the Democrats didn’t pass the ACA? That’s hard to believe.
Certainly many of us back in 2009 pushed for more stimulus and have continued to do so in the years since. We have been frustrated by President Obama’s failure to clearly argue the case that more spending and larger deficits will be needed to get the economy back to full employment. However none of his defenders has ever tried to say that the ACA somehow prevented him from going the route of more stimulus.
The second, and more important, reason that Schumer’s argument is silly is that the number of people benefitted by the ACA is not small. The number of people who benefit directly at a point in time from getting insurance on the exchanges will not be very large. But what Schumer missed is that tens of millions of people who have employer-provided insurance are always at risk of losing their insurance if they lose their job. The ACA means that even if these workers lose their jobs, they and their families will be able to stay insured through the exchanges.
This is hardly a small group of people. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, more than 4.5 million workers lose or leave their jobs every month. A large percentage of these workers would be at risk of losing insurance for themselves and their families without the ACA.
Furthermore, because people know that they can get insurance outside of their job, the ACA will give people the option to leave jobs they don’t like, without the fear of losing insurance. The ability to tell an obnoxious boss to take their job and shove it is incredibly valuable.
Many people will use this freedom to take the opportunity to start a business. Others may decide that they would rather work part-time to spend more time with their children or pursue other activities.
The November jobs data released last week showed that voluntary part-time is up by more than 1 million (6.1 percent) from its year ago level. These are people who say that they are working less than 35 hours a week by choice. (Involuntary part-time employment has fallen by more than 600,000 over the last year, although it is still well above pre-recession levels.)
Helene Jorgensen and I did an analysis of the growth in voluntary part-time employment in the first six months of this year. We found that the increase was overwhelmingly concentrated among young parents, with a rise of 11.3 percent compared with the same months of 2013. In this case also, the number of parents who are benefitting at a point in time from being able to spend more time with small children will be relatively limited, however over a span of five or ten years, the percentage of the population who benefit will be substantial.
The ACA is far from perfect. It would have been much better to have a universal Medicare system or at least have a public option, but it was a huge step forward not only because it insured millions of previously uninsured people, but even more importantly because it freed tens of millions of workers from dependence on their employers for insurance. This is especially important for workers who have serious health conditions or have family members with serious health conditions.
It is striking that Senator Schumer seems so ill-informed about the impact of the ACA. It is important that the rest of the public know more about the ACA than Schumer, both so they can take advantage of its benefits and so that they can work to improve it.
THE INVISIBLE HAND ** out of ****
THE ILLUSIONISTS ** out of ****
SWAMP JUICE ** 1/2 out of ****
THE INVISIBLE HAND ** out of ****
NEW YORK THEATRE WORKSHOP
I have the sinking feeling I will remain in the minority on playwright Ayad Akhtar. He won the Pulitzer Prize for Disgraced, a show I didn’t like in its original production and continued to not like when it debuted on Broadway recently. Now his new drama is at the New York Theatre Workshop in a cast led by Justin Kirk. The Invisible Hand has a terrific hook of a premise and its message is very baldly stated. But unlike Disgraced, this show can’t even boast of a production that offers it up with care.
The premise is indeed arresting: Nick Bright (Justin Kirk) is some sort of US hotshot, a Wall Street whiz kid who works for a major financial firm and has been advising the Pakistani government on investments or its country’s financial structure or some such thing. When the play begins, he has been kidnapped and being held for ransom. It was all a mistake: the terrorists (or freedom fighters, if you’re on their side) was hoping to snag the head of Nick’s bank. They got Nick instead.
Now he’s their captive, a not very valuable asset who can’t even command much attention from the outside world. Their leader the Imam (Dariush Kashani) was hoping to raise $10 million. Nick is a realist: he can raise $2 million, maybe $3 million at the most. He’s not worth $10 million to anyone. That raises the other possibility; they might hand off NIck to a third party terrorist group, out-sourcing his execution to create a stir in the media.
With no real leverage, Nick is buddying up to his captors. First he convinces the sheepish Dar (Jameal Ali) to take a chance on buying potatoes and serving as a middle man; Dar happily tells Nick he made $75 in profit based on this advice. Then there’s Bashir (Usman Ally). He too is rather sheepish, lowering his head like a little boy when the Imam chides him for his mistake in grabbing Nick.
But Bashir has a yen to learn more about finance. And maybe Nick’s skills aren’t so useless after all. NIck takes the money he can raise on his own and uses it make various plays in the market. If he can triple his money, Nick will have raised his own ransom, taught Bashir some valuable skills and gained his freedom. Assuming, that is, the Imam keeps his word, doesn’t decide Nick is too valuable to let go if he can generate cash like that or discover that Nick spends his nights trying to scrape out an escape in the air duct behind his bed.
Here’s video of playwright Ayad Akhtar praising New York Theatre Workshop (the springboard for shows like Once and Peter and the Starcatcher) and rightly urging your support of its work.
The scenic design by Riccardo Hernandez for the first act is suitably grim: it’s sheet metal of the tin shack variety stretching out over the audience and giving a sense of grey despair, aided by the dirty grey walls and the awful florescent lights of Tyler Micoleau.
The ensemble is ok, including Justin Kirk, an actor I like very much. But they’re all playing types. The premise of The Invisible Hand might have gone in many directions: black comedy, scathing satire, absurdist, bitterly real. But Akhtar has again landed on dully earnest. Not a single character convinces as a living, breathing person. The politics never advances beyond the most banal pronouncements and when it does it beggars belief. Nick, who is working in Pakistan and advising that country’s corrupt military government, truly thinks the US government always tries to do good? Even if he ignored history (like the US overthrow of democracy in Iran to install a brutal dictator) surely he’s at least familiar with the present. But truly Nick remains an enigma, and not in an interesting, playing his cards close to his vest sort of way. He’s just an idea meant to illustrate a point. Investment banks may not be firing weapons but their hands aren’t “clean.” Indeed, all citizens are complicit in the actions of their government; their hands aren’t “clean” either. That’s the thudding message we’re meant to absorb, one that most any audience — and certainly ones in New York City — would have embraced even before the show began.
But there are many more problems. [SPOILER ALERT} Act One ends with Nick attempting escape. It’s no surprise to discover he doesn’t get away. But his escape is badly staged, with Nick slipping through that grating…into another pool of light on the other side of his prison’s walls. Surely he should disappear into inky blackness. Even worse, act two begins with a very dramatic set alteration. The roof of his prison rises and rises and rises. The one desk has been joined by another one. All of it portends big changes. Is his prison going to look more like a trading floor? Will Nick — the nominal prisoner — start acting more like a boss since they’re dealing with finance, the world he knows best? Nope. And that dramatic change in the set has absolutely no payoff; no reason for being.
It really is a good premise that Akhtar has squandered here. As is illustrated in act one, knowledge is power. When they know of a terrorist act about to take place, they almost unwittingly take advantage of it to make money. That’s pushed to its logical extremes in act two, but not in a way that challenges Nick or reveals his generally rapacious nature or causes him to push back or do anything that might involve actual drama and character development.
Finally, there are office politics to deal with, a struggle for power in the world of Nick’s hostage takers. He gains a smidge of a hint of information and is confronted late at night by the Imam. They are alone and this is the key moment for Nick, a guy who bets on futures, a guy who uses information to gain an edge. Will he reveal all to the Imam or is the smarter move to remain silent and place his bets on the upstart. Tellingly, at this pivotal moment, the one that will define Nick’s moral dilemma in starkly personal terms: Akhtar looks away and ends the scene before the actual moment the play has (almost unwittingly it seems) been building too. It’s almost shockingly undramatic. To cap it off, that choice doesn’t seem to matter in the least. We don’t feel it affected Nick’s fate one way or the other.
The Invisible Hand has the kernel of a good play and a decent ensemble (especially Kirk and Kashani). But it also has the all too visible hand of a playwright manipulating cardboard characters to make a not very interesting point.
THE ILLUSIONISTS ** out of ****
MARQUIS THEATRE
A magic show on Broadway? Fun! It’s been a long time since Doug Henning stormed onto the Great White Way in the mid-1970s with The Magic Show, a one act musical with his illusions peppered throughout that became one of the biggest hits in history. Any parents uninterested in taking their kids to Wicked (again) might opt for this harmless night of pleasure. As long as they expect Vegas-style cheesiness and some genial acts, they’ll be fine. Here’s their trailer and then a guest performance on America’s Got Talent.
These acts — any of which would be better in a smaller, less lavish setting — are not done any favors by director/choreographer Neil Dorward. They pose on stage like superheroes about to defeat an arch enemy. They are surrounded by assistants wearing costumes by Angela Aaron that make them look like escapees from The Road Warrior (not her fault; it’s undoubtedly exactly what she was asked to do). Said assistants must repeatedly pose in positions combining denizens of a haunted mansion with a fashion runway. And the music of the house band (composed by Evan Jolly) underlines every moment of action to the nth degree.
It’s curious. You get the sense watching kids that our age of endless digital special effects has made them blase about magic done in person. On TV, they used to emphasize — hey, this is magic being done on our set; no camera tricks are involved. Now they have to do the same thing live in person — once or twice one of the cast members exhorts the passive crowd, hey, that was a magic trick there! Applaud! Indeed, when The Inventor aka Kevin James (not that one) rubs his hands together and sends snow cascading out over the crowd, people don’t even seem to be wondering how he did it or the spectacle of snow falling indoors. Maybe they were waiting to see it in 3-D?
To be fair, many of the elaborate stunts on display ultimately depend on banal bits of misdirection or the rather obvious substitution of a stand-in. At the low point of such shenanigans, The Inventor has seemingly chopped a man in half and we see the man on a short rolling platform and James literally shoves the man offstage so that we can’t see what happens to him next. A minute later he is rolled out and “put back together.” Leading everyone in the audience to rightly think about what exactly happened while he was out of view. In that case, they didn’t even attempt misdirection or a bald-faced substitution; they just went backstage to set up the “magic” where we couldn’t see.
I’m being mean, perhaps because I was so close to the stage and on one side that I literally could see exactly what they were doing most of the time. (Neil Patrick Harris says we shouldn’t try to figure magic out; is he out of his mind? Of course you try to figure it out!) Despite the silly trappings surrounding them, I found most of the acts pretty amiable. Andrew Basso aka The Escapologist does a Houdini stunt and there’s something refreshing about having a stunt explained and seeing it done right in front of us. (Houdini secreted a pick in his mouth or elsewhere on his person; Basso just tells us he’s got a bit of metal to fiddle with.) Adam Trent as The Futurist had a pleasant patter going as one of the two hosts. Dan Sperry as The Anti-Conjuror was genuinely funny with his sardonic demeanor, especially when he was blessed with a very cranky audience member as his “volunteer.” Sperry made the most of it. Jeff Hobson as The Trickster — imagine Charles Nelson Reilly as a magician/con artist — was even better. On the down side, both James and Aaron Crow as The Warrior fit right in with the Vegas aesthetic: all flash and no substance.
But there’s something wrong with a show of illusions where the one-liners are more memorable than the actual magic. Luckily, their ace in the hole was Yu Ho-Jin as The Manipulator. Essentially, he just manipulates cards but his skills of dexterity are obvious. More to the point, his flair and presentation was elegance and simplicity itself, the opposite of the rest of the show as envisioned by Dorward. Yu Ho-Jin presumably does some modest variations that escaped me but by and large it’s a very simple act built around cards with some standard misdirection at work. But it’s the way he does those classic moves, the beauty and control he displays which makes this act a pleasure to watch, even if you sort of think you know how he does it. None of that matters when the real magic is on display: talent.
SWAMP JUICE ** 1/2 out of ****
BARROW STREET THEATRE
Swamp Juice is Jeff Achtem’s one man show, an ode to shadow puppetry. He recycles a bunch of familiar objects around the house and sets up several lights to cast shadows on a screen. Half the time, you’re watching the shadow play on the wall; the other half of the time you’re looking at Achtem to appreciate and marvel how he manages to make those illusions appear. (Oh, he’s doing that? you might wonder as he lifts a foot into the air or some crazily convincing illusion has a simple origin. Neat!)
It lasts 60 minutes and if you bring a kid and get lucky, they might pester you to buy them their own starter kit in the lobby. Of course, being kids today, they’ll then record their own shadow plays on an iPhone and post it on YouTube, but hey, that’s being creative too! Here’s a glimpse of Achtem’s work.
I feel disposed to be kind towards this show. But the truth is that it would have been a lot more fun at 15 minutes, maybe as one part of an evening of vaudeville. (In its heyday, he could have toured the country and done this act again and again.) Though he tries, Achtem hasn’t really developed a feature length story out of his characters. He’d be better off shortening this one drastically and coming up with two other very different tales, though even tale is a strong word for the journey-like doings on display here. Perhaps a pre-existing folk tale to ground his creativity in character and story?
The finale involves 3-D (ooh!) and in truth it’s the most enjoyably silly 3-D I’ve seen in a long while because it’s just a gimmick, he knows it and we don’t have to wear those glasses for more than 5 or so minutes. A bit of silliness where the audience had to hold various implements over their heads and characters from the show flew over them probably works better in a room of kids. But even then it was a lot of bother just to create some audience participation.
Achtem, to be clear, held my attention with his personality and skill. He’s got an engagingly quirky sensibility and the talent to bring images to life in a way we rarely see. Here’s hoping the success he’s enjoyed with this act spurs him on to create a real story, one that can hold our imagination no matter how it’s told. Because other than his shadow puppetry, there’s almost nothing to take away from Swamp Juice. And the way a story isn’t told should never be more important than the story itself.
THEATER OF 2014
Beautiful: The Carole King Musical ***
Rodney King ***
Hard Times ** 1/2
Rosencrantz And Guildenstern Are Dead **
I Could Say More *
The Loneliness Of The Long Distance Runner **
Machinal ***
Outside Mullingar ***
A Man’s A Man * 1/2
The Tribute Artist ** 1/2
Transport **
Prince Igor at the Met **
The Bridges Of Madison County ** 1/2
Kung Fu (at Signature) **
Stage Kiss ***
Satchmo At The Waldorf ***
Antony and Cleopatra at the Public **
All The Way ** 1/2
The Open House (Will Eno at Signature) ** 1/2
Wozzeck (at Met w Deborah Voigt and Thomas Hampson and Simon O’Neill)
Hand To God ***
Tales From Red Vienna **
Appropriate (at Signature) *
Rocky * 1/2
Aladdin ***
Mothers And Sons **
Les Miserables *** 1/2
Breathing Time * 1/2
Cirque Du Soleil’s Amaluna * 1/2
Heathers The Musical * 1/2
Red Velvet, at St. Ann’s Warehouse ***
Broadway By The Year 1940-1964 *** 1/2
A Second Chance **
Guys And Dolls *** 1/2
If/Then * 1/2
The Threepenny Opera * 1/2
A Raisin In The Sun *** 1/2
The Heir Apparent *** 1/2
The Realistic Joneses ***
Lady Day At Emerson’s Bar & Grill ***
The Library **
South Pacific ** 1/2
Violet ***
Bullets Over Broadway **
Of Mice And Men **
The World Is Round ***
Your Mother’s Copy Of The Kama Sutra **
Hedwig and the Angry Inch ***
The Cripple Of Inishmaan ***
The Great Immensity * 1/2
Casa Valentina ** 1/2
Act One **
Inventing Mary Martin **
Cabaret ***
An Octoroon *** 1/2
Forbidden Broadway Comes Out Swinging ***
Here Lies Love *** 1/2
6th Annual August Wilson Monologue Competition
Sea Marks * 1/2
A Time-Traveler’s Trip To Niagara * 1/2
Selected Shorts: Neil Gaiman ***
Too Much Sun * 1/2
Broadway By The Year 1965-1989 ***
In The Park **
The Essential Straight & Narrow ** 1/2
Much Ado About Nothing ***
When We Were Young And Unafraid
Savion Glover’s Om **
Broadway By The Year 1990-2014 ***
The Lion ***
Holler If Ya Hear Me * 1/2
The Ambassador Revue ** 1/2
Dubliners: A Quartet ***
The National High School Musical Theater Awards *** 1/2
Wayra — Fuerza Bruta * 1/2
Strictly Dishonorable *** 1/2 out of ****
Between Riverside And Crazy ***
The Wayside Motor Inn ***
Bootycandy ***
Mighty Real ***
This Is Our Youth ***
Rock Bottom * 1/2
Almost Home * 1/2
Rococo Rouge **
Love Letters ** 1/2
The Money Shot ** 1/2
The Old Man and the Old Moon *** 1/2
You Can’t Take It With You * 1/2 out of ****
Can-Can at Papermill ** 1/2
The Country House ** 1/2
Cinderella ** 1/2
Shakespeare’s Sonnets at BAM (Rufus Wainwright, Robert Wilson) ***
When January Feels Like Summer ** 1/2
It’s Only A Play ***
The Curious Incident Of The Dog In The Night-Time *** 1/2
Found **
Generations ** 1/2
On The Town **
The Belle Of Amherst **
The Fortress Of Solitude *** 1/2
When Father Comes Home From The Wars Parts 1, 2 & 3 *** 1/2
Disgraced **
The Real Thing ** 1/2
The Last Ship ***
Ghost Quartet *** 1/2
Show Boat ***
Sticks and Bones **
The Seagull by Bedlam ***
Sense and Sensibility by Bedlam *** 1/2
Saturday Night/Musicals In Mufti ***
Lost Lake **
Grand Concourse **
Side Show **
Tamburlaine Parts 1 and 2 ** 1/2′
Straight White Men **
The Erlkings * 1/2
A Delicate Balance **
Allegro *** 1/2
Our Lady Of Kibeho ***
Tristan & Yseult **
Lypsinka! The Boxed Set ****
The Invisible Hand **
The Illusionists **
Swamp Juice ** 1/2
_____________
Thanks for reading. Michael Giltz is the founder and CEO of the forthcoming website BookFilter, a book lover’s best friend. It’s a website that lets you browse for books online the way you do in a physical bookstore, provides comprehensive info on new releases every week in every category and offers passionate personal recommendations every step of the way. It’s like a fall book preview or holiday gift guide — but every week in every category. He’s also the cohost of Showbiz Sandbox, a weekly pop culture podcast that reveals the industry take on entertainment news of the day and features top journalists and opinion makers as guests. It’s available for free on iTunes. Visit Michael Giltz at his website and his daily blog. Download his podcast of celebrity interviews and his radio show, also called Popsurfing and also available for free on iTunes.
Note: Michael Giltz is provided with free tickets to shows with the understanding that he will be writing a review. All productions are in New York City unless otherwise indicated.
WASHINGTON (AP) — Key lawmakers weighed legislation to permit a reduction of benefits for up to 1 million retirees at economically distressed multiemployer pension plans, officials said late Monday as Congress labored over a $1.1 trillion measure to keep the government operating past midnight Thursday.
The officials said the goal of the secretive pension talks was to preserve benefits as much as possible and avert bankruptcies at troubled plans that could in turn endanger the stability of the federal Pension Benefit Guaranty Corp. Few details of the proposed changes under discussion were available. Republicans and Democrats on the House Education and Workforce Committee issued a statement that said lawmakers “are still discussing the details about a possible legislative solution to the multiemployer pension crisis and remain hopeful Congress will act before the end of the year.”
Proposed changes have the support of many of the multiemployer pension plans in financial difficulty, but has drawn opposition from other, healthier entities.
The officials who provided further information did so on condition of anonymity, saying they were not authorized to pre-empt a formal announcement. The PBGC website says multiemployer plans result from collective bargaining between a labor union and more than one company.
The issue was among numerous items affecting the final shape of the spending measure, one of a handful of must-pass items clogging the agenda for lawmakers eager to adjourn for the new year.
Others were bills to extend dozens of expiring tax breaks, authorize President Barack Obama’s policy of arming Syrian rebels to fight Islamic State forces and a Democratic drive to confirm as many administration nominees as possible before the Republicans take control of the Senate in January.
Legislation to continue preventing state or local governments from imposing a tax on Internet access also seems likely to make it to Obama’s desk.
There was relatively little controversy over spending levels themselves in what was shaping up as a classic year-end measure that rolled numerous unrelated issues into a single package. The $1.1 trillion in total spending adhered to spending caps approved in previous negotiations between Obama and House Republicans. It included more than $5 billion of the $6.2 billion the president requested to fight Ebola at home and overseas.
The money would be available to keep the government running through the Sept. 30, 2015, end of the fiscal year, except for the Department of Homeland Security, which oversees border security programs. Even failure to complete work before Thursday at midnight would not lead to a government shutdown, since lawmakers were prepared to pass a stopgap bill for a day or two to make sure there was no interruption in federal services.
Unlike the rest of the government, enough funds were made available for the Homeland Security Department only until late winter. Republicans hope that will allow them to use their new leverage to force Obama to roll back his decision suspending the threat of deportation for millions of immigrants in the country illegally.
Even before then, some conservatives sought to use the year-end funding measure to try and force a presidential retreat. Sen. Jeff Sessions, R-Ala., complained the legislation “will allow the president to move money around to fund his executive amnesty program.” He said he hoped Congress would prevent it.
Business-friendly Republicans were largely united behind efforts to roll back government regulations affecting the trucking industry, financial sector, federally-funded school lunch program and more in what shaped up as something of a dress rehearsal for next year, when the GOP controls both houses of Congress.
Democratic officials said they had rejected several proposals to ease environmental regulations, and the fate of other attempts was unclear.
Among them was an attempt to ease a regulation by the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Association requiring truckers to take a 34-hour rest break at least once every seven days and that it span two periods between 1 a.m. and 5 a.m. In a blog post, Transportation Secretary Anthony Foxx said the regulation had been upheld in court, and said efforts to overturn it “will put lives at risk.”
Supporters of a change in the new rule included Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, as well as numerous lawmakers in both parties, and outside groups warned that the 2011 rule would result in more trucks in traffic when commuters and morning school buses were on the road.
Officials said Republicans also sought a suspension of new school lunch program requirements supported by first lady Michelle Obama that require more fruits, vegetables and whole grains while limiting sodium, sugar and fat. Some school nutrition directors have lobbied for a break, saying the rules have proven to be costly and restrictive.
Also on the table was an attempt to ease some of the requirements in legislation that regulated the financial industry in the wake of the economy’s near collapse. Republicans sought to include them as part of a bargain with Democrats seeking a renewal of legislation that requires the federal government to assume some of the insurance risk in losses arising from terrorism. Without a renewal, the terrorism reinsurance program will lapse at year’s end.
___
Associated Press writers Mary Clare Jalonick and Joan Lowy contributed to this report.
By Nina Smith, Executive Director, GoodWeave International
GoodWeave aims to end child labor in the carpet industry by certifying child-labor-free rugs and by providing education and opportunities to rescued and at-risk children.
The young girl reached for the pencil and then paused with the blank piece of ruled paper in front of her. Her teacher looked on, not knowing what to expect as this was their first class together and her literacy level had yet to be tested. The student gripped the pencil tightly in her hands and said: ”I always dreamt of drawing or writing on paper and playing with a pencil between my weaving fingers. And now I can.”
Sitting on the floor of her home in a village in central Afghanistan, Basma is far from the millions of American children who started a new school year this September. At 13 years old, Basma is having her first day of school – ever.
Only weeks before, Basma had been found working on a carpet loom by one of our organization’s inspectors. Her “weaving fingers,” as she described them, already showed signs of arthritis from holding tools since the age of nine, tying knots for 14 hours a day.
According to the International Labour Organization, there are 168 million child laborers like Basma, forced to sacrifice their youth and their education. In Afghanistan, UNICEF estimates that as many as one in three school-age children are put to work, many of them weaving rugs for Western retailers.
GoodWeave was able to find Basma because the rug on her loom was destined for a U.S. company that had joined our certification program. The company tasked GoodWeave with ensuring no child was exploited anywhere in their supply chain. In exchange, their rugs bear the GoodWeave label, a signal to consumers of the products’ ethical origins.
If a child is found, GoodWeave arranges educational opportunities. But for Basma and girls across Afghanistan – where the female literacy rate is a dismal 12 percent according to the U.N., and the Taliban still intimidate schoolgirls – the stakes of holding a pencil are high.
Basma’s father adamantly refused that his daughter would get an education. After GoodWeave facilitated discussions with the family and a representative from the overseas importer, he agreed to home-schooling with a female teacher.
This story is not only relevant to the many families who have recently sent their children back to school. It resonates around the world following the announcement last week that the 2014 Nobel Peace Prize will be shared by GoodWeave founder Kailash Satyarthi and Malala Yousafzai “for their struggle against the suppression of children and young people and for the right of all children to education.”
When Kailash founded GoodWeave, it was with the idea that harnessing the power of the marketplace could disrupt the economic incentives driving child exploitation (watch Kailash tell GoodWeave’s founding story). Child labor isn’t so cheap if it costs you your brand reputation. I’m not sure any of us could have imagined just how far this idea could go -reaching a home in an Afghan village and compelling a father to educate his daughter.
At first it was a feat for Basma to even hold a pencil, but her teacher now reports that she is filling those pages of ruled paper with letters and numbers.
Between October 27 and December 5, GoodWeave participated in the Skoll Social Entrepreneurs Challenge on CrowdRise.
Adorama has announced the arrival of the camera-toting drone, the Aries Blackbird X10 quadcopter. As with similar products, the drone is able to record video and take still images from the sky, doing so with a variety of stability, camera, and control systems technologies. Adorama itself is a big photography and electronics retailer, and it is exclusively offering the Aries … Continue reading
Enjoy this neat time-lapse of all the International Space Station modules assembled since 1998 because, as the international tension between East and West continues, it’s starting to become clear that it won’t survive beyond its already extended-mission time limit of 2020.
This is site is run by Sascha Endlicher, M.A., during ungodly late night hours. Wanna know more about him? Connect via Social Media by jumping to about.me/sascha.endlicher.
